As a project manager, you’ve probably managed both short and long term projects. Big ones that lasted six months, or a year or perhaps even two years. Likewise, you’ve probably been handed those $10,000 projects that last five weeks.
Let’s consider those longer-term projects you’ve been dealt. Lots of phases, perhaps a big team of skilled resources, and maybe even 1,000 tasks or more when you detail it out in full project management glory and share it using a tool like Seavus’ Project Viewer. You know the project….massive…huge…hard to get your head and arms around. Right?
When there are critical pieces with drop dead milestone dates that individual stakeholders are pulling for it can sometimes be hard to remember that as the project manager you're still responsible for the whole thing and no one piece takes precedence over any other. They are all part of the whole...part of the overall solution that you and your team are implementing. So keeping everything in proper perspective, no matter who you’re trying to please or complete work for on any given day, is critical.
For several years I was responsible for leading software implementations for a firm with their own proprietary software that implementation teams would customize and configure for each individual customer. The software had many separate modules that customers could purchase individually – thus some customer implementations had more phases than others. Some phases involved implementing one customized module while others involved implementing several modules at once – it all depended on the project, the customer, the timeframe available, and the priority or need for a particular module of the software to be up and ready at any point in the overall implementation.
With each project came the responsibility of properly managing the scope and when to implement each phase and what needed to happen when. And yes, negotiation with the customer can play a part, because it may sometimes become necessary to move phases around when funding becomes an issue or resources become an issue or changes with the customer’s plan become an issue. If you don’t keep an eye on the overall big project picture, it can become very easy to focus on individual business unit needs within the customer organization as well as individual module implementations.
When this type of situation happens, it’s critical that you have a good, collaborative project management software tool – like Seavus’ Project Viewer mentioned earlier for example - in place that you can use to manage both the individual phases and assigned tasks closely while still being able to filter and customize reporting on the big picture. And by that big picture I mean the overall project schedule with a view of how the individual implementations for each phase tie into the big project picture. As negotiations happen and portions of the project inevitably get shifted around based on project and customer timing needs this is absolutely critical.
Summary
Project managers often find themselves pulled in many different directions by the customer, the team, their executive management and just the overall project itself depending on where it’s going right now and what issues are being experienced. We find ourselves negotiating pieces of the project and timing and budget at a very low level while we’re still trying to maintain that thousand-foot view of the project as a whole. It’s not as easy as it sounds – it never is. Making use of a tool that you can trust in the hands of your project team to help you manage the overall project tasks, assignments, completion percentages, dependencies, and costs is critical. By keeping the project stakeholders focused on the big picture view of the project, you help ensure that the project timeframes don’t slip and you can help ensure that the overall project scope is well managed and hopefully unaffected.